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The Strange Politics of Google Autocomplete

In the late 1930s, as humans managed to launch yet another war that would fail to end all wars, H.G. Wells wrote a series of essays laying out a plan for a better world. Wells, a novelist, reformer and sometime historian, believed that technology could connect people in ways that had never before been possible, joining them in a network and uniting their wisdom into a kind of synaptic and singular mind. The structure Wells imagined would be, he declared, “a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared."

Wells’s “World Brain” would, sadly, remain unrealized in his lifetime. But the World Wide Web, built decades later on the foundations of the military-industrial Internet, was created for the express purpose of sharing ideas and connecting people around them—for building, essentially, a global mind of the sort envisioned by Wells. The web has since been organized (and, in some sense, humanized) by search engines operating under the assumption that information is, fundamentally, a means of connection.

Today, thanks to Google, the most dominant of those engines, we have a tool that taps into humanity’s hive mind better than anything Wells could have imagined. We have snapshots of the information people seek when there’s no barrier between them and their curiosity save for an open field and a flashing cursor. We have … Autocomplete.

And Autocomplete offers much more than insight into people’s queries about love (“why is love … so hard/important/so complicated”) and life (“will life ever … get better/be like star trek”) and mysterious rashes (“on face/on neck/on arms/on legs”). When it comes to politics, Google’s crowdsourced search predictions are shockingly revealing, offering largely unmediated insights into people’s investigations and observations of their elected officials: think of them as real-time push polls accessible and viewed by millions. Think the public is full of high-minded individuals who, in the privacy of their own browsers, turn to Google to understand the intricacies of our political system? Nope. It turns out many of us would rather know if, say, Secretary of State John Kerry has had plastic surgery than whether he’s about to clinch a deal with Iran. The burning question about House Speaker John Boehner? Why he cries so often. About New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker? Whether he’s gay.

Autocomplete is a microinteraction—a minor feature that has come to define, and standardize, our approach to the Internet—that ends up making some macro points about the American political system. And, like so many things built on the Internet, it manages also to be extremely meta. Type a term into Google’s search bar—or, actually, type just part of that term—and you get, instantly, a little summary, ranked and snapshotted, of all the other search terms that have been entered into that same little box. Autocomplete is the collective questioning of the world, transformed into text. It is the curiosity of the Internet … made into Internet curiosities. It is glorious.

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The auto-generated returns can offer, at turns, melancholy and hilarity and poetry and paranoia. But Autocomplete is more than simply a freeze-framed insight into the pulsing, pining soul of the world. Focused on politics, it can also be a kind of choose-your-own adventure story, courtesy of your clicks. So if I type, say, “Barack Obama is…” into Google’s search field, I am presented (depending on my browser and its configuration) with four options:

The point, however, is that—thanks to Google’s aggregations of questions—I have found myself here on educate-yourself.org, and, now that I have done so, I can, indeed, educate myself—not necessarily about the president’s supposed lizard brain, but about my fellow Americans’ examinations of the alleged lizardry. Google, in giving me a peek inside its cyborg-style mind, has taught me that there have been enough people who have been curious about the president’s status not just as an American, but as a human, that their curiosity has become publicly associated with searches about the president. And that curiosity, with the help of Autocomplete’s infrastructure, has compounded as people like me—people who wonder not about Obama’s humanity, but about those who would think to question it—click on “reptilian.”

And on and on it can go—ad infinitum and, occasionally, ad nauseam.

Start to investigate the politics of Autocomplete and you head down a road with a mind-boggling array of possible iterations. You can take a similarly forking path with Hillary Clinton (“evil,” “bi,” “communist”) and Joe Biden (“an idiot,” “a moron,” “from,” “dead,” “a dumbass”) and Ted Cruz (“an idiot,” “Canadian,” “crazy,” “a jerk,” “a moron”). Search, click, site-surf (and then, should you choose, browse another site, and then another) … until you have gotten a synaptic education about the political wonderings and wanderings of your fellow citizens.

Even with Barack Obama, the reptilian path is far from the only road to take. Omitting the “Barack” in the search yields “gay,” “an idiot,” “a muslim,” “a liar.” Or you can add “why does” to your query about our president, to revealing effect: